RIM unveils BBX and Android apps on PlayBook

At Blackberry’s annual developer conference in San Francisco, RIM (Research in Motion) unveiled a new operating system in hopes of grabbing some attention away from the iPhone and Android phones. And no, this is not Blackberry 8.

Named BBX, the operating system combines “the best of” BlackBerry’s elements used in its current smartphones with QNX – the OS currently used on the Blackberry Playbook. Notably, its creator, QNX Software was acquired by RIM back in 2010

The Canadian company gave few details about the software. No screenshots or videos debuted with the announcement nor did they say when devices using it would be available. This contradicts an announcement made earlier in September where future phones would run on QNX via the Blackberry Colt.

Then began the inevitable – addressing the service outages that frustrated millions of BlackBerry users last week. He said the company restored service as quickly as possible and is working on figuring out the causes and “making this right” for BlackBerry users worldwide.

On Monday, BlackBerry tried to soothe customers by offering more than $100 worth of free software to each one and giving some a month of technical support.

The disruption came as RIM, once dominant in smartphones with its secure BlackBerry email service, has been losing ground to more consumer-friendly offerings such as Apple Inc.’s iPhone, smartphones running Google Inc.’s Android software and, more recently, Windows Phone 7.

RIM has sold 165 million BlackBerrys through August. Apple had sold 129 million iPhones as of June, but its device has been on the market for a much shorter amount of time.

RIM has also lagged in the market for apps that run on smartphones and tablets. Its BlackBerry App World, which includes apps for its smartphones and its PlayBook tablet computer, includes more than 46,000 apps. That is just a fraction of the hundreds of thousands of apps offered for the iPhone/Android phones and less than

RIM, which is based in Waterloo, Ontario, is trying to encourage developers to be more prolific, though, by showing off new software Tuesday that makes it easier to build apps and get them into the company’s online store.

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